Social justice book reviews
If you’re familiar with the online atheist superpower Atheist Republic, then you’ve probably heard of their book Why There Is No God, written by their founder Armin Navabi. I’ve had this book for a while, and I decided this weekend to finally read it and give my opinion here on my blog!
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If there’s anything my family loves other than Jesus, it’s reading. I grew up involved in both, but for me, the Jesus didn’t stick, but the reading did. My books are obviously not the kind that my family would want me to read, but that’s irrelevant. Read more
When people find out that someone is an atheist, they usually have a lot of questions. I’ve seen in my experience that most of these questions take the offensive stance and are often accusatory. Atheists are used to hearing things like, “Where do you get your morals from?” and “Why do you hate God?” One of the most common of these quips is “How do you know for sure that there is no god?” which also takes the form of “Well, you can’t prove that God doesn’t exist, so disbelief is illogical.” These statements are the embodiment of the theist’s attempt to flip the burden of proof. Read more
This is the week when we will find out for sure what LCMS Lutherans believe about creationism! I feel like this is something I’ve been wanting to know for years, but I’ve never really been able to ask my family directly, and the one time I asked my brother-in-law, he said he wasn’t totally sure but to check out the Concordia Theology blog for answers. So that’s what I’ve done, and it may finally tell us what Lutherans believe. So far I have read and responded to the introduction to this series, as well as their Lutheran-colored analysis of Old Earth, Young Earth, and Evolutionary Creationism. This is the conclusion of Charles Arand’s series, and it’s called A Few Reflections on Creation in Genesis 1. In the beginning, Arand states,
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Last year, we lost a man who was one of the most famed scientific minds to date. Stephen Hawking took after Albert Einstein in a quest to discover how the universe works, even in the face of the greatest adversity. Hawking was a pioneer on the quest to reconcile quantum physics with Einstein’s theory of general relativity, and his specialties were the study of black holes and how we might be able to reverse what we know about them to find out how the Big Bang occurred. Brief Answers to the Big Questions was the first book I read by Hawking, but I already feel like I’ve learned so much.
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This week, I finally did something I have been wanting to do for a long time: I put “atheist” on my Facebook profile. It was less of a dramatic coming-out than I had anticipated; to see it, you would have to go to my profile and scroll through my “About” section and find it listed under “religious views”. I could have made it into a post that will show up in people’s News Feeds, but I didn’t find that necessary. I did, however, follow a number of atheist pages, and maybe one day I’ll share some of their posts for all my friends to see.
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This week I am continuing my study of what my family’s denomination of Lutheranism, the LCMS, believes in regards to creation and origins. I began this series after my brother-in-law read this blog post where I responded to an article about creationism written by the president of the LCMS, and my brother-in-law then suggested I read what the Concordia Theology blog states on the matter. This brings me to today, when I read Concordia Theology’s fourth post in their creationism series, called “A Travel Guide to the Evangelical Creation Debates: What is Evolutionary Creationism?” by Charles Arand. In the past, I’ve also covered their posts on Old Earth Creationism and Young Earth Creationism.
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When I was in church as a teenager, the pastor started a series of sermons and bible study lessons called Back to Basics, where he would teach the basic topics of the Lutheran faith. It was a good way to incorporate new members while getting everyone on the same page when it came to more complicated details of their beliefs. Borrowing from this idea, I’d like to do the same thing with this blog; I’ve covered a lot of atheism-related topics so far, like objective morality, Pascal’s Wager, and the paradoxes of prayer and free will. There are a lot of other topics, though, that I’ve only briefly touched on in other posts, but I’d like to spend some time going into more detail on them. The first topic in my Atheist Back to Basics series is going to be that of agnosticism and atheism. Read more
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year (and happy birthday to me)! Last week I gave my review of Daniel Dennett’s Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, and this week as everything slows down during the holidays, I’m giving my blog post over to him. Here are 30 of my favorite Dennett quotes from Breaking the Spell!
For the last two months, I’ve been getting to know the work of the fourth horseman of atheism: Daniel Dennett. I’ve read and reviewed the other three, Dawkins, Hitchens, and Harris, before this, and I’ve found it interesting to get to know each author’s writing style and area of expertise. Dawkins is an evolutionary biologist, Hitchens takes a political science approach, and Harris and Dennett each take their own individual approach to psychology. But from what I’ve seen, Dennett is the only one with the greatest amount of reserve when critiquing religion, while it seems that the other authors are attacking it.
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